Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The Browser team at INdT's OpenBossa Labs is proud to announce the 0.1 release of WebKit/EFL, a development milestone targeted the Enlightenment community.

We hope the release will give feedback about the overall usage of the web runtime and embedding API, as well as encouraging people in contributing to the port. Due to a change in focus, our team at INdT will have to minimize our envolvement somewhat, but we will still do maintenance and patch reviews.

Since the first announcement of the port during December last year, the code has been refactored in many of its crucial parts, resulting in good performance improvements. Now, six months later, we believe the project is mature enough to gain wider testing.

Quick start

1) About WebKit

WebKit is an open source web contents engine powering products such as Google Chrome and Android browser, Apple's Safari and iPhone browser, as well as Nokia's web runtime for S60.

2) About EFL

The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL for short) are a set of graphical libraries intended to provide easy-to-use resources for building rich user interfaces based applications. It is the core of the Enlightenment window environment. As mentioned in its official web site, "the libraries are meant to be portable and optimized to be functional even on devices such as mobile devices". Its core components are:

Evas: Highly optimized raster canvas

Edje: Declarative UI library

Ecore: Event loop and utility classes

Eina: Basic data types

Embryo: Scripting

3) About the port

WebKit was born to be toolkit independent: "WebKit's HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE. As part of KDE framework KHTML was based on Qt but during their porting efforts Apple's engineers made WebKit toolkit independent". Currently there are browser components based on WebKit for the following toolkits (officially upstream only): Qt, Gtk+, wxWidgets, Windows, among others. This port is about adding EFL to the list of supported toolkits, providing an easy-to-embed browser component/widget into EFL based applications. As the developers also work on the Qt port, we try to keep the implementation as close as possible to that of QtWebKit. The build system was based on Gtk+'s though.

WebKit/EFL currently compiles and runs on Linux, and is not yet upstreamed, however tries to follow WebKit trunk as much as possible, though it might be a week or two behind.

_Painting

Painting is performed using Cairo on an offscreen surface, thus all painting is double buffered. For this to work on 16 bit devices such as the Nokia Internet Tablet, some patches needs to be applied to the shipped Cairo version.

_Networking:

Networking is based on Libcurl, which is used elsewhere by EFL, and was thus a natural choice. Cookies are supported.

In order to better demostrate its performance (which is just great on Desktop), we have ran it on an Linux embedded device (in our case, an n810 running manoma). Alecrim, also from INdT, has written some niceblogposts about it. Below are two of the videos he made showing WebKit/EFL running on a n810 with mamona.

I'm pretty new to all of this but I'm trying to get a version for the OMAP 3530 which I would like to run on a Gumstix board (similar to Beagleboard, same family of chips as the N900). Any clues how I would go about doing that?